The Handmaid’s Tale

Monday

Bridget Phetasy

I am woman. Watch me push

My husband and I recently attended the virtual childbirth classes offered by the hospital where I am registered to deliver our first child. We are classic first-time parents. We have no idea what to expect. Excited and terrified, we’re aware that no matter how much we prepare, there is really no way to. So we signed up for the six-hour class on a Saturday, hoping to get some sense of what labor would be like and the standard procedures at the hospital. The three nurses who taught the class had been bringing babies into the world for well over a decade. They seemed funny and capable. However, it wasn’t long into the training before they started referring to us as variations on a theme of pregnant: “pregnant people,” “pregnant persons,” “birthing persons.

women

Tuesday

Matt Purple

Our Handmaid’s Tale hysteria

If you read one book this fall, make it The Handmaid’s Tale TV show. And then don’t read another book, ever again, if you want to remain au courant on Twitter. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, and the more recent Hulu series, which depict a futuristic America called Gilead where women are treated as breeding chattel, have become a political obsession. They're used as a kind of shorthand by the trendy left for the medieval theocracy my fellow pro-lifers and I are supposedly hammering together in our spare time. This totalitarian state is evidently being built over the scaffolding of the lawless Randian anarcho-syndicate we were accused of building just a few years ago. But then those kindly old ladies praying rosaries outside abortion clinics are nothing if not adaptive.

handmaid’s tale